A look inside an industry of distortion, where unnamed corporations pay richly to bend the debate their way

WASHINGTON — Even by the contemporary standards of bare-fisted attack ads, the unlikely assault on the president of the Humane Society of the United States seems particularly brazen.

“Is Wayne Pacelle the Bernie Madoff of the Charity World?” the ad says, comparing the leader of the nation’s largest animal welfare group to the swindler serving a 150-year sentence for losses of $65 billion in the world’s most notorious Ponzi scheme. As a narrator speaks, an image of Pacelle is shown morphing into Madoff.

Then the attack widens. The Humane Society, the narrator says, “gives less than 1 percent of its massive donations to local pet shelters but has socked away $17 million in its own pension fund.” Dollar bills are shown floating in front of Pacelle’s smiling face as the narrator says donors should only continue to contribute to the Humane Society “if you want your money to support Wayne and his pension.”

This one-minute ad — viewed 1.7 million times on YouTube and created by a nonprofit organization called the Center for Consumer Freedom — provides a case study of what critics say is an industry of distortion in Washington. Increasingly, groups are seeking to influence public policy not by the traditional methods of lobbying or campaign contributions, but, as in this case, by hurling accusations, true or not, that are intended to destroy an influential target’s credibility.

On one level, the charges can be easily refuted, according to the ad’s target, Pacelle. The Humane Society president said his organization shelters more animals than any other group, mostly using its own facilities instead of contributing to others, and he said that the $17 million pension fund covers hundreds of employees, not just himself.

The ad “is comparing me to America’s most notorious white collar criminal and I have a spotless record on financial matters and we also do exactly what we say,” Pacelle said, decrying what he called the ad’s “lies and fabrications and misrepresentations.”

But on a broader level, it is the story behind the ad that is most revealing — a story that provides a window into a world of questionable claims, powered by donations from unnamed corporations, and a Washington agenda with many millions of dollars at stake.

The group behind the ad, the Center for Consumer Freedom, is headed by a Washington-based corporate communications consultant named Richard Berman, the head of Berman and Company, a public relations and government affairs firm.

The center’s funding includes large donations from corporations whose identity it does not disclose. But Berman and his associates have said in depositions and interviews that backers include food and farming corporations.

Some of those companies have been at odds with the Humane Society, which backs legislation in Congress and state legislatures to improve conditions for farm animals. An ad defending the cramped size of animal pens is, needless to say, hardly as attention-getting as one comparing the Humane Society president to Madoff.

Sarah Longwell, the vice president of Berman and Company, declined to take questions from the Globe, writing via e-mail that “no one here will be participating in your story.” Berman did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Washington, of course, is a city with many operatives who act for corporations seeking to shape public opinion about issues before Congress without leaving fingerprints and without having to directly associate their name and brand with the attacks made on their behalf.

Indeed, from the upper reaches of the Washington power structure on down, questionable or outright false statements have become a way of doing business.

Hyperbole and distortion are common, a carryover from the rhetorical free-for-all of political campaigns; the result is that there is much public confusion about the issues, about what is fact and what is merely an interested parties claim.

Gun control opponents say the government plans to take away guns. Obamacare opponents say the government wants to take over health care. So-called “birthers” went after President Obama by suggesting he was not born in America despite indisputable evidence he was born in Hawaii. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid last year said Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney didn’t pay federal taxes for 10 years, even though Romney provided a letter from his accountant that he said refuted the charge.

Misinformation has become so widespread that a counter-industry of fact checkers has emerged at various media outlets; The Washington Post rates misleading statements on the number of “Pinocchios,” while the Pulitzer-winning website PolitiFact gives the biggest whoppers a grade of “Pants on Fire.”

In a political campaign, a candidate making questionable claims can be held accountable by voters at the ballot box. But accountability is harder to come by in the shadowy world where Berman and like operatives do their work. There, corporate backers are anonymous, funding groups that have vague but high-sounding names, such as the Center for Consumer Freedom. The work of such groups receives far less scrutiny from media fact-checking operations than that of political candidates.

In this realm of opinion molding, Berman is a pioneer. He maintains one of the longest-running and most influential enterprises in the field. His attacks typically are carefully worded so that each sentence can be defended as narrowly accurate. But his critics say many are constructed in a way that distorts the overall picture, as in the case of the ad comparing Pacelle to Madoff.

Berman boasts on his website of his influence, saying that his groups’ research is cited on the floors of the House and Senate, shaping countless pieces of legislation. His op-eds run in newspapers across the country, sometimes without making clear the sources of his corporate backing. He was quoted in a 2003 book about US politics as saying companies “can pay us to represent them and retain their anonymity,” while he vows on his website that he will stick with an issue “as long as it takes to win.”

While Berman’s work has been in and out of the news over the years, his profile recently has been raised due to a confluence of events that has focused new light on his activities.

Charity Navigator, an independent group that analyzes nonprofits, recently gave five of Berman’s groups its lowest rating, known as a “donor advisory,” saying the nonprofits used most of their funds to pay Berman’s for-profit company for management services and other costs.

Charity Navigator president Ken Berger said in an interview that such transfers were “very rare” and “raise a lot of questions.” (In response, Berman’s group recently posted a note on its website saying that Charity Navigator’s finding is “misleading” and that there is nothing unusual about the way Berman’s nonprofit groups pay into Berman’s for-profit firm.)

The Humane Society, also citing transfers among Berman entities, has filed a complaint against him with the IRS, alleging that Berman’s groups have engaged in “systemic abuse of their tax-exempt status.” An IRS official said the agency could not comment on whether a complaint is being investigated. A Berman website says that the IRS investigated earlier complaints and “did not change the non-profit status of any of the groups they reviewed — nor was any organization sanctioned.”

Melanie Sloan, the head of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which filed an unsuccessful complaint with the IRS against Berman’s groups in 2004, said Berman’s activities have only grown since then. Corporate backers are “using Berman to say outrageous things that they themselves would never say because of the risk of alienating some of their customers,” she said. Berman, in turn, has attacked Sloan’s group as a “left-wing attack dog.”

Berman has said he has to resort to such tactics because his adversaries — some of which also don’t disclose most donors — make unsubstantiated claims and haven’t been properly scrutinized. “It is a strategy,” he testified before a US House committee in 2002, “to reposition people who have a pristine image which is undeserved . . . . If that’s shooting the messenger, then I’m guilty of it.”

* * *

One of Berman’s top vehicles for “shooting the messenger” is his Center for Consumer Freedom, which is described on a Berman website as being “supported by restaurants, food companies and thousands of individual consumers.” The depth of support from consumers is unclear, but certainly the center is aggressive in going after groups that have been at odds with the food and restaurant business, including the Humane Society and organized labor.

Berman and other representatives of the center have, for example, regularly made media appearances to press the case of his corporate backers. Berman appeared on Fox News in April to castigate calls for increasing the minimum wage. A Berman employee, J. Justin Wilson, the author of a book published by the Center called “An Epidemic of Obesity Myths,” appeared in February on NPR’s popular “Diane Rehm Show,’’ presented as a counter-point to experts who warned of the danger of addiction to high-sugar foods.

Berman and his employees have written more than 100 op-eds and letters to the editor in newspapers this year, including a piece by Berman posted to an online forum of The Boston Globe, in which he was identified as the center’s director and wrote that a proposed state law called the Prevention of Farm Animal Cruelty Act “is less about helping animals and more about a fringe agenda to bankrupt farmers.”

Much of Berman’s work is done through websites, one of which, “Humane Watch,” has been publicized in Times Square billboards and a Super Bowl commercial. Many are designed to counter the findings of federal health studies.

The Center for Consumer Freedom, for example, runs a highly trafficked website called “Obesity Myths,” which says that it is “myth” that “obesity will shorten life expectancy.” The website noted — correctly — that federal officials had lowered an estimate of premature deaths from obesity. But that revised report still said that many such deaths would occur, according to federal officials.

Dr. William Dietz, who until last June was director of the CDC’s division of nutrition, physical activity and obesity, said that the Berman group’s claims are “ridiculous.” The evidence that obesity can shorten life is abundant, he said, even as the estimate of premature deaths has gone down. He expressed frustration that the government’s reports are sometimes presented in the media on equal footing with those sponsored by groups like Berman’s whose clients have a vested interest.

“Part of the problem with public debate these days is that everyone seems to have an equal voice and belief seems to have displaced science,” Dietz said. “Anytime someone wants to dismiss the science they will go after the people who publish it.”

* * *

Berman began his career working in senior executive positions for a series of corporations, including Bethlehem Steel and Pillsbury, and he served as director of labor law at the US Chamber of Commerce. Then he created Berman and Company, focusing on government activity that affects corporations. He got his start with funds from tobacco giant Philip Morris, which paid at least $600,000 to fight smoking-related legislation, and millions of dollars from alcohol-related businesses.

By the mid-1990s, Berman was at the center of a fight against legislation designed to limit drunken driving fatalities. On one side was Mothers Against Drunk Driving, a group that few in Washington were anxious to take on. Berman jumped at the chance.

It was a time when many state legislatures were considering legislation to lower the blood alcohol limit from 0.10 to 0.08. In order to reach the 0.08 level, a 160-pound man must consume four drinks in an hour, while a 120-pound woman must down three drinks in two hours, according to the Food and Drug Administration. That level of intoxication makes it difficult for drivers to process information and control speed, the FDA has said. Proponents said lowering the legal level to 0.08 would let people drink in moderation, while saving thousands of lives.

Berman saw it differently.

“It’s feel-good, meaningless legislation that doesn’t have any impact,” Berman testified at a 1997 hearing. He suggested focusing instead on “the 0.14-and-above drivers [who] are at the heart of the drunk-driving problem.”

US Senator Frank Lautenberg, a New Jersey Democrat who attended the hearing, rose from his chair to declare that “what I heard Mr. Berman say I found almost shocking,” recalling how he had met with a family in which a young girl was killed by a driver whose blood alcohol content was 0.08.

Berman’s efforts may have delayed efforts to lower the alcohol limit, but his argument was, in the end, unsuccessful. Spurred by federal incentives, the number of states with a 0.08 limit went from 19 in 2000 to all 50 by 2004. As a result of that and other measures, including setting the drinking age at 21, alcohol-related fatalities have dropped from 13,472 in 2002 to 9,878 in 2011, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

But Berman, in his role as president of a trade group called the American Beverage Institute, continues to battle Mothers Against Drunk Driving. The institute says on its website that its mission is to “expose and vigorously counter the campaigns of modern-day prohibitionists.”

In January, Berman associate Sarah Longwell, the managing director of the Institute, authored an op-ed in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in which she took on MADD, saying the group wants the federal government to require monitoring devices to be placed in cars of those convicted for drunken driving. Such devices prevent a car from starting until the driver has passed an in-car breathalyzer test. That’s unfair, she wrote, because a person whose blood alcohol limit is at the state limit is no more impaired than someone who is “driving while talking on a hands-free cellphone.”

At the same time, the American Beverage Institute runs a website called “The New Prohibition,” which alleges that a network of “anti-alcohol activists,” including the American Medical Association and Mothers Against Drunk Driving, “seek to return the United States to the 1920s,” when alcohol use was banned. The website said that if anti-alcohol activists have their way today, some people won’t be able to have “a beer at a ballgame.”

While MADD has advocated in-car breathalyzers for convicted drunk drivers, it supports the current 0.08 blood-alcohol limit, according to senior vice president J.T. Griffin.

“The ‘new Prohibition’ is an absolute lie,” Griffin said. “They are trying to paint us as an extreme organization. It is shameful coming from an organization that doesn’t reveal who their sponsors are.”

While it is impossible to say how much impact the “new Prohibition” campaign is having, MADD officials say they are monitoring the Berman effort closely, particularly as state legislatures review their decisions to lower the drinking age and consider requiring in-car breath test machines.

* * *

The Center for Consumer Freedom, as well as Berman and Company and several affiliated groups, share the address of a downtown Washington office building. The publicly available portion of the Center’s 2011 tax filing shows that it is mostly funded by a handful of generous, anonymous donors. An individual identified only as “Donor No. 1” gave $300,000. “Donor No. 6” gave $520,000. All told, the nonprofit Center received$1.4 million in 2011 in contributions and grants. It spent $2.1 million, of which $1.3 million was paid to the for-profit Berman and Company for management, research, advertising and accounting fees, according to its IRS filing.

While tax rules allow the identity of donors to nonprofits to be anonymous, the Center says on its website that its contributors must remain secret because “they are reasonably apprehensive about privacy and safety in light of the violence and other forms of aggression some activists have adopted as a ‘game plan’ to impose their views.”

Eight blocks from the headquarters of the Center for Consumer Freedom, Wayne Pacelle sits in his office at the Humane Society and fumes over the Center’s attacks on him and his group. The ad comparing Pacelle to Madoff, released on April 5, is only the latest. For months, Berman’s group has suggested that the Humane Society is bilking donors because it gives less than 1 percent of its money to pet shelters.

Pacelle said it is a classic Berman strategy of “false framing” of an issue. The society, he said, doesn’t say it will give large amounts to independent pet shelters. Instead, Pacelle said that the Humane Society takes care of more than 100,000 animals at its own facilities, including a 1,300-animal care center near Dallas and a 1,200-acre wildlife rehabilitation center ranch near Fort Lauderdale.

Berman “doesn’t give us credit for any of the animals we care for,” Pacelle said. “The only metric he uses is if we give a grant to a pet shelter.”

Pacelle said he has alerted Berman to “misrepresentations” many times without a response.

So why is Berman’s group attacking the Humane Society and Pacelle? Pacelle believes Berman has been hired by corporate interests such as agri-business and restaurant chains that don’t like the way the Humane Society has influenced food- and agricultural-related legislation in Congress and state legislatures. For example, the Humane Society has been fighting for years, and with some success, to force big farms to get rid of pens that prevent pigs from turning around, urging that such structures be replaced with facilities that let the animals roam a bit.

The tactics are a sign of change in Washington, Pacelle said. It used to be that a company would hire a Washington representative to oppose a particular piece of legislation. What is new, he said, is that Berman is trying to destroy the “brand” of the Humane Society, not just a pending bill.

It is hard to quantify Berman’s success rate. Unlike a lobbyist who files a report declaring which legislation he is trying to influence, Berman works on behalf of unnamed backers and tries to shape public perceptions about his targets. As a result, Berman can claim success in delaying legislation or undermining an opponent. For example,in an e-mail to one of his backers — a copy of which was provided to The Globe — Berman wrote that the campaign against the Humane Society was “far more successful than I anticipated” in creating a negative image, asserting that he was “chilling the donation stream.”

Pacelle said donations have more than doubled during the time that Berman has attacked him but added there was no way to know if more money would have come in without the assault.

Berman’s group also has gone after People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which has angered some farm and food groups by conducting investigations into the treatment of farm animals. Berman’s Center for Consumer Freedom created a website called “PETA kills animals,” which says PETA killed 1,647 cats and dogs in 2012.

The strategy was a classic effort for Berman: the headline-grabbing fact is correct, and PETA says the number of killed animals is accurate. But PETA said the broader implication is misleading. PETA says it “euthanizes” only the most “broken” animals brought to its “shelter of last resort.” PETA senior vice president Jeff Kerr said Berman’s charges are “like complaining that a hospice has a high mortality rate. It’s entirely misleading.” Kerr said that the real aim of the attack is to undermine PETA because the group’s promotion of a vegan diet cuts into the profits of Berman’s backers.

While some groups prefer to ignore Berman’s tactics, the Humane Society has filed a complaint with the IRS that alleges the Center for Consumer Freedom and other entities created by Berman have violated tax laws and may owe more than $23 million to the IRS.

“We have been the first major organization to punch back and try to expose his attacks on many of America’s most respected charities,” Pacelle said. “He doesn’t like that and he knows that so much of it stems from my passion not to let this guy get away with his scam and I will continue to go after Rick Berman until he is completely exposed.” But such steps seem to have only increased the animosity.

* * *

It was last summer when Berman launched another hardball effort to undermine the Humane Society — an effort he may have believed would not become publicly known. He wanted one of the nation’s leading charity-rating organizations — the Wise Giving Alliance of the Better Business Bureau — to drop its accreditation of the Humane Society. If that happened, donations to the Humane Society might significantly decrease, and Berman could claim another victory.

Berman’s tool was an unsubtle warning. He threatened to publicize what he called a “pay-to-play” system, in which charities that are rated by the Wise Giving Alliance have the option of paying to display the group’s endorsement.

“You can protect [the Humane Society’s] brand at the BBB’s expense,’’ Berman wrote in a June 27, 2012 letter to the Alliance, “or you can protect the BBB’s brand.”

The BBB’s Wise Giving Alliance strongly denied that it engages in “pay to play,” stressing that groups are not required to purchase the right to display the accreditation.

Berman then traveled in August for a meeting at the headquarters of the Wise Giving Alliance, whose officers said they received permission from him to record the conversation. The Humane Society is “as duplicitous an organization as I have ever seen,” Berman said at the meeting, according to a transcript provided by the Alliance.

Berman said he was speaking for his financial supporters, calling them “big companies” who were tired of being attacked by the Society. “They are very upset with the Humane Society,” Berman said, according to the transcript. “We are several million dollars into going after them.”

And if the Alliance wouldn’t act — revoking the Humane Society’s accreditation — Berman repeated his written warning that he and his backers might go after them, too. “As I try to get to the goal line, worst case scenario is, in regard to the Better Business Bureau, if you’ll excuse the expression, become collateral damage,” Berman said, according to the transcript.

H. Art Taylor, the chief executive of the Wise Giving Alliance, investigated Berman’s allegation that the Humane Society was running a “scam.” He said in an interview that he found his claim baseless and thus the Society has kept its accreditation.

Taylor provided the correspondence and transcript to the Globe because he said he wanted the public to understand Berman’s methods. “People ought to know why we are pushing back,” he said.

* * *

Berman gave one of his most revealing talks about his strategy in a locale far from his Washington office. Meeting with a group of Nebraska farmers in 2010, he told them it was more effective to “hit people in their heart rather than their head,” according to a report on the talk by Nebraska Farm Bureau News. “Emotional understanding is very different — it stays with you. Intellectual understanding is a fact and facts trump other facts. When I understand something in my gut, you’ve got me in a very different way.”

Berman then explained why he believes such attacks work. “People remember negative stuff,” Berman said. “They don’t like hearing it, but they remember it . . . . We can use fear and anger — it stays with people longer than love and sympathy.”

“Obesity is the only epidemic that you can cure
by keeping your mouth shut.”--Richard Berman,

The Center For Consumer Freedom

1: Genre Preference,
Prejudice, or Envy?

I was working the door {at our Oakland
warehouse space in San Pablo] one night when we had a last minute change in
plans. A show at The Stork Club, one of the few legal music venues left in
Oakland, had been double-booked apparently. The booker wanted to know if we
could combine it with our regularly scheduled show. It was a low-fi hip-hop
show (old school, just a DJ and 3 MCS), and we jumped on the chance to do it. I
was suspicious that the Stork Club was really double-booked, as the manager had
his share of white supremacist tendencies, and had already alienated much of
the black community in a recent incident), but their loss could be our gain.

When we told the already booked bands about it,
they got uptight. We reached a compromise; the rappers (Beme, Grl Abstrakt, and
Pill Kosby) could play, but only if they don’t get paid. BeMe said that was
fine with him, and I told him we’d book a show soon in which he could get paid.
Still, the already-booked white bands were less than thrilled. During the
first, very short, hip hop set, a guy from one of the bands came up to me with
blood in his eyes, “How the fuck are we supposed to follow that?!” I could’ve
regaled him with tales of Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry, to enjoin him to
take it as a challenge--but instead I just gave him a “dude, get over it” look
and went upstairs to get a more physically imposing doorman to back me up, just
in case….

Meanwhile, the women got the dancing going, and
many of us were won over by the low-budget beats of Pill Kozby and the charisma
of BeMe. Beme got progressively more comfortable as he performed, falling into
a touring band’s drum kit that had been set exactly between the stage area and
the audience. The tour-manager freaked out; she went up stairs and started
shouting, “this is unacceptable” and such. He certainly wasn’t trying to be
violent; it was more like moshing; besides, why did they chose that particular
spot to set up the drums?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQmMwiwGSgw

We tried to calm her down; “it’s just like
punk” Matt & Evan reminded her, yet the night made it clear to me how much prejudice
and latent racism exists in “our” scene---not any more than at SMC, but not
really better either. Frankly, what Beme was doing was even more ‘punk’ than
what these bands were doing. No wonder they didn’t want to share the bill with
him. None of them got people dancing or even bobbing their heads as much as he
did. I got so swept up in the spectacle, and trying to dance with my bad leg,
that I had very little sense of his words (probably for the same reason I suck
at free-styling; I get distracted by the beat especially on first listen),[1]
aside from the chorus:

Five in my pocket just
spent two skinny jeans own the ain't new

I can't wait till I'm
rich rich Imma buy a whole lotta shit

When I posted the video and learned the song
was called “Rich,” I wondered if it was typical of most commercial hip hop in
glorifying consumerism and personal wealth,[2]
though later Paddy was pontificating about BeMe’s lyrics. “Oh, he’s conscious
hip hop. Only clueless folks who know nothing about rap are into that.” I was
just happy to be a part of the event. How important is the overplayed
difference between “conscious” and “gangsta” anyway? I am more than willing to
admit I’m clueless about today's hip hop in general, but when I finally heard all the
lyrics, they cut as deep as any page-based poet as well as any of the more
known ‘poetic’ white bands I’ve worked with.

A month or so later, we invited BeMe back to
the warehouse for what I had hoped would be a paying gig. My new band was
playing as was a new band featuring ex-members of The Cuts and Detroit’s The
Go, but there had been a big December rain storm and the slum-lord, one Mr.
Thomas Leung, had still failed to come through on his promise, and legal
obligation, to fix the leaks. I discovered the warehouse was flooded, puddles
everywhere. Wading in ankle-deep water with a flashlight, we discovered the PA
was destroyed.

We went through with the show, but even the
people who lived in the warehouse were so pissed off they had left to crash on
other people’s couches. Thus, there was no one to work the door, and hardly any
one came (I had largely become a shut-in). I felt terrible after what had
happened to BeMe at his first show, and started suspecting that the flood was
just an excuse for the other guys in out so-called “collective” to screw him
again---but I have no proof of that, as I tried to stay focused on the common
enemy, Mr. Leung and the City of Oakland’s crackdown on live local nightilfe
culture. All of the plans Nehemiah, Matt and me had for the warehouse seemed to
be going down in this flood.

Still, BeMe was much more into performing even
to the audience of 20 at best, even though he had found out his drum machine
wasn’t working. I asked him if he’d be up for us backing him up. We could do
one of our instrumental two chord jams and he could do one of his raps--what do
we have to lose? He was into it. It took a little arm-twisting; Jed was
intimidated and preferred to do the set we had rehearsed. Eric was into it, but
didn’t want Nick Allen to join us on guitar. I thought that would be amazing,
but I saw Eric’s point: BeMe’s raps and my piano playing are both rhythmic and
melodic, and it could be too busy with the guitarist on the fly, especially for
a bassist who doesn’t like being treated like “glue.” We could do it next time
(or so I thought...).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILOuDLD7UmQ

BeMe chose to do the same song, “Rich,” he had
performed at the first show. The band was sloppy as hell, but grooving and fun.
Maybe it was all the adversity preceding this, but it was one of the best live
performances I’ve ever been a part of, so good that we decided to record it
with at The Creamery.

II.
“Eating Disorder” (Courtesy of Washington Lobbyists)

“Obesity is the only epidemic that you can cure
by keeping your mouth shut.”--Richard Berman,

The Center For Consumer Freedom

In the studio, I realized the song was
primarily about his eating disorder, and suggests a way out of both our
culture’s “obesity crisis” as well as the energy
crisis. Once I heard all the words, the chorus becomes deeper and more complex
than a mere ode to salvation through consumerism:

Grew up on the floor
wishing i had more\

Chillin with my sister
waiting by that door

Wishin bought something
from the liquor store

She threw down in the
kitchen "can i have more"

Maybe over did it got too
chubby cookies and cream ice cream was my buddy

One of the only way she
could show that she loved me

The first verse portrays inner-city ghetto
life, and even echoes Dickens’ Oliver Twist.[3]The speaker has special powers, as his wishin’ can get him food, but
limited horizons. “She,” as we soon discover, is his mother. One of the hardest
things about being a parent is saying “No.” As a kid, my mom used to pour milk
and loads of sugar onto a bowl of strawberries. I loved it, or thought I did.
It took me years to realize that strawberries were actually sweet without all
that.

Though we didn’t have to rely on the liquor
store for food, we were also nutritionally challenged. “You look sad, you want
a sandwich?” Of course I did; it tastes good. You certainly aren’t going to
hear too many 5 year olds complaining that pizza is not a vegetable. He’s
sympathetic to his mom, and can’t blame her for living in a culture in which
“food” becomes the main way to show love. As post-industrial America became
increasingly alienated from the body; this was sold as “progress” to the first
generation under this new food regime, and increasingly the “norm” to Beme
& my mother’s generation.[4]

When I told Beme I could immediately relate to
the psychological truth here, he told me that as a teenager he had actually
been around 300 pounds. This admission blew me away, as one who has struggled
with food all my life, the fact that he was able to lose all this weight, and
write a song about it, was absolutely heroic to me. There just aren’t
that many songs in any genre these days with lyrics this blatant about dieting;
there are much more songs about hunger, whether viewed as desire or
need:

We couldn't go to Disney
land we was livin with Mickey's fam

Sometimes even seen
roaches

Thats the life that you
live when your po kids

Dreaming of the promise
land like Moses

But didn't make it
"sorry coaches"

Mama said you gone buy me
a house boy

I'm still workin on it
mama no doubt boy

The verbs propel the song, as they chart a
progression from chillin’ to waitin’ to wishin’ and dreamin’ to workin.” As the nouns move from “more”
to “door” to “store,” to “poor,” his horizons expand; he becomes aware of the
stigma of poverty. But his horizons aren’t the only thing that’s expanding, as
he’s growing up, and out. It might have even been healthier
had he been eating “Mickey’s fam.” The speaker of this feels pressured
by love for his mother to lead her to the “promised land” as well, and
just as feeding him fattening junk food was how she showed love, making the
coach’s team would be a way for him to show this love; as sports is almost the
only legally sanctioned way to the succeed, or even survive, when you’re “po
kids.” As a chubby kid, it’s a lot harder to make the team, unless you’re an
O-Line or D-line type (but Beme’s more of an aerial attack kinda guy). When the
chorus returns, it now has deeper significance:

Five in my pocket just
spent two skinny jeans own they ain't new

I can't wait till I'm
rich rich Imma buy a whole lotta shit

He seems very happy that he’s still got $5
left, perhaps because he didn’t waste it on all that rich, fattening food, and
is wearing old clothes--skinny jeans.

The second verse offers a “before and after”
picture that helps make sense of the chorus. It starts with a list of the
food-like things he could be buying with that $5 in the skinny jeans--but if he
did, he would have no money to buy the Fat Pants he’d have to get. A “while
back” he was just a consumer, now he’s working his butt off, and loving it.

What you know about
dollar cup breakfast

3 dollar Loko's livin
reckless had that on my 7/11 checklist

Next to oatmeal raisin
cookies and chips

And next to that a sandwich
looking up at the owner like dude I'm famished

that was a while back...

Then a resolve:

Livin clean and sober
bout to get my money right

Working out daily bout to
get the honeys right

Did you see my video yeah
i got my tummy tight

Floyd Mayweather shit a
big money fight

Fightin for my life and i
don't fight fair

Nigga stand when i rap i
don't like chairs

How you actin bored and i
featured

How you actin poor and
you ain't paid to be here

It’s not just a song about spending less on
food now that you have to work for it. Clean and sober also means skinny,
getting his money right for the ladies--even if he has to get rich to do it.
The dream of getting rich may be quixotic, but certainly no more toxic than the
more ‘modest’ gratifications of junk food, as it embraces the emptiness rather
than trying to fill it with food. As he works out daily, he spends the fat, and realizes it can
actually buy him time to work on his
music, as he turns his focus like a sanctified preacher to address the worst
possible audience he can imagine: a sedentary
one.

Since I’m paid to be here, and you’re not, why
stand there bored dreaming of the Oatmeal Raisin and chips you’ll have when you
get home? When he performed at Copland [The unfortunate name of our Warehouse
space that's now Qilombo], many of the white guys were clearly acting
bored, in their defensive hipster coolness, neither would they pay him. The
girls weren’t acting bored, as he claimed space like a one-man army against The
Center For Consumer Freedom. He’s not singing for his supper as much as for a
video or a gym membership. These things cost money, but are much less than
expensive than inadequate health insurance: Beme the rapper is a transformative
factory, changing the shit you call
food into the food you call shit, the
shit:

Five in my pocket just
spent two skinny jeans on they ain't new

I can't wait till I'm
rich rich Imma buy a whole lotta shit…

And when its over give me
DVD's and a bad chick like eve

I big loft dolphins in
the pool i don't mean on the wall friends

Yeah yeah now thats cold
Steve Austin

A winter in Boston the
heart of a Slauson

You need more than $5 in the pocket so you can
buy some new skinny jeans, but

The song has it both ways, working toward a
better future (“I’m gonna”), but not at the expense of playing in the present:
the future is the excuse for the present, the contagious carpe diem catharsis of “I can’t wait.” He doesn’t want stills, but moving pictures. Enough
“pretty faces” and wire-mesh mothers that feed food, he wants animals, human
warmth, even if he has to get rich to get it.

The funny thing about this 3rd verse
is that you don’t really have to be all that rich to get DVDS or “even a bad chick like Eve,” if “she wants my
honey not my money” (as David Bowie puts it in “Hang On To Yourself”). A big
if, perhaps, and dolphins in a pool can be pretty damn expensive, and they’re
not really happy unless they’re free. But you don’t have to buy the ocean if
you can live on the beach.[5]
For Beme, mere bling is but a head on the wall, he wants the hunting, and
“Rich” enacts the hunting, as the scope of this rhyme stretches from the
coldest northern high-rent white supremacist town to the heart of South
Central, and beyond.

Beme’s defense of the right to shit, and to
shit talk, is one with his war against mere salvation-through-consumerism in
“Rich.” In the Bay Area culture, where self-proclaimed “foodies” have a large
voice, there’s a lot of denial over the fact that there never was a foodie who
wasn’t also a shitty, but shit
produces, gives back, and can get you off the floor that too much food put you
on. As the Oakland graffiti puts it, “stop
buying/ shit, shit shit.”[6]Shit, at least human shit, is largely outside commodity, and buying shit is
like buying animals rather than buying food

Yet Beme’s rap goes beyond the mere food/shit
dichotomy. Beme’s “shit talk” is also music; the body is not a bank, but the
music is rooted in the breath, the free improvisatory flow of words that are
also tethered to the formalism of rhyme. Talk is ex-lax; rap betters the
talking cure. It, too, is a work out that can make you less hungry. As a mural
from the Oakland-based Community Rejuvenation Project suggests: there’d be less
eating disorders and drug addictions if people were allowed to talk more, if
word-jazz and singing were more acceptable. In this sense, Richard Berman is
wrong: it’s harder to solve the obesity crisis by keeping your mouth closed.
The extra energy you get from dieting has to go somewhere.

Only a decade earlier, in NYC at least, it was
common to see guys rapping and doing the dozens on the streets and subways.
This may be a matter of both time and place, as the Bay Area has a smaller
black population and is less music-friendly and more repressed than both NYC in
1999 and Philly in 1989. It’s not really a coincidence that the rise in
black-on-black crime and drug use as well as obesity in the last 30 years
parallels the loss of street-music culture and the increased tension of silence in the streets. There would be
fewer guns if drums weren’t machines, but that’s not said too much. They’ve
also been trying to take away the drums since Congo Square, and courtesy of
Exxon, developer of Autotunes, have succeeded more than ever. In fact,
Autotunes hates black people more than George W. Bush ever did.[7] Beme’s
rap this song may not be as “universal” as songs about love and death, but for
me it’s a kind of anthem!

People as talented and prolific as Beme usually
leave Oakland, but Beme has stayed here, trying to make something happen
against terrible odds. Luckily, he told me he met his girlfriend at that show.
After the warehouse went down in the flood, and KUSF got taken off the air by
Entercom, I also felt that I had to get the fuck out of this town if there’s
any hope of continuing to play music, but Beme gives me hope, and even a reason
to try to make something happen here. He gets the Gil Scott Heron and Baraka
thing, as well as the post-gangsta thing. He is at home working the crowd as he
is when leading the discussion in my class at Laney.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YhUJLlHkek

So make a movie about him, and release his
singles! If we can ever get the loan for the radio station, or the
MFA-In-Non-Poetry going, I’d offer him a job in either, or both, capacities,
and hopefully we can make music again.

[1]Even
now, hearing “La La” by Lil Wayne (Bislo and Busta rhymes), I just don’t hear
the words. I focus on the beautiful fusion of rhythm with the toddler “La la”
melody with no need for auto-tunes, but my housemates are in some ways hearing
a totally different song.

[2]As
in this critique of contemporary hip hop, “We don’t need Marx to see that the
result of selling the world ghetto raps was not an improvement in conditions
for those living in the ghetto, but instead, a means of production was
developed to sell the condition of the ghetto by simultaneously sustaining
those conditions....” (Rapublicans).

[4]When TV came out in the 50s, my grandmother war warned
by a friend: “it might make you fat!” so she decided to start smoking to
prevent that, after all she was a working mother

[5]Someone
told me that she makes much more money in America than she ever did when she
lived in the Caribbean, but even though she was poor before she moved her, she
lived on the beach and ate lobster whenever she wanted. As the old adage goes,
if you can’t be happy while your poor, you won’t be happy when you’re rich.

[6]The line break suggests the deeper truth, that shitting
is the opposite of buying, and what is needed in a culture that has eaten more
than it can digest (Ezra Pound; Percy Byssh Shelley)

[7]Both
the Media and The Government are simply two forms of Dispersants used by BP to
hide behind. In 2009, the use of Auto-Tune to create melodies from the audio in
video newscasts was popularized by Brooklyn musician Michael Gregory and later
the band The Gregory Brothers.
The Gregory Brothers digitally manipulated recorded voices of politicians, news
anchors and political pundits to conform to a melody, making the figures appear
to sing.[15][16]
The group achieved mainstream success with their Bed Intruder Song
video which became the most-watched YouTube video of 2010. Even Jay Z disses auto tune.

About Me

7 books of poetry, including Stealer's
Wheel (Hard Press, 1999) and Light As A Fetter (The Argotist UK, 2007). My critical study (with David Rosenthal) of Shakespeare's 12th Night (IDG books)
was published in 2001; more recent prose writings of contemporary media studies
and ethnomusicology have appeared on-line @ Radio Survivor
(http://radiosurvivor.com/2011/06/02/a-history-of-radio-and-content-part-ii-jukeboxes-to-top-40/)
and The Newark Review
(http://web.njit.edu/~newrev/3.0/stroffolino1.html). A recipient of grants from
NYFA & The Fund For Poetry, Stroffolino was Distinguished Poet-in-Residence
at Saint Mary's College from 2001-06, and has since taught at SFAI and Laney
College. As a session musician, Stroffolino worked with Silver Jews, King Khan
& Gris Gris and many others. Always interested in the intersections between
poetry and music, he organized a tribute to Anne Sexton's rock band for The
Poetry Society of America, and joined Greg Ashley to perform the entire Death
Of A Ladies' Man album for Sylvie Simmons' Leonard Cohen biography in 2012.
In 2009, he released, Single-Sided Doubles, an album featuring poems set to
music. In 2016, Boog City published a play:AnTi-GeNtRiFiCaTiOn WaR dRuM rAdIo. Stroffolino currently teaches creative writing and critical thinking at Laney College